Nessus is een security scanner die een netwerk kan scannen op bekende exploits en openstaande services. Let daarbij wel op dat het programma alleen gebruikt mag worden wanneer je toestemming hebt om de veiligheid van het netwerk te controleren. De lange lijst met exploits en openstaande services kan eventueel verder uitgebreid worden met eigen geschreven scripts. Het pakket draait onder de meeste Posix-systemen zoals Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux en Solaris. De ontwikkelaars hebben sinds kort versie 2.2.6 op de website staan met de volgende aankondiging:
Nessus 2.2.6 has been released today. It is a maintenance release which fixes several minor bugs, adds a new function to the NASL language and contains an improved version of the Nessus TCP scanner. We recommend to every Nessus 2.2 user to upgrade to this version. Here is a quick summary of the changes and improvements in this release:
Changes affecting the Nessus engine:Changes affecting the Nessus plugins:
- Fixed a problem which would prevent nessusd from starting up properly when the system clock is not configured properly
- Under certain circumstances, the plugins preferences may appear twice in the Nessus GUI
- nessus-fetch is more reliable when used in a very low bandwidth environment
- nessusd has higher memory limits when running on a 64 bits CPU
- New NASL function socket_get_error() which returns the last error which occured on a socket (timeout, connection reset, etc...)
- Removed the C function http_recv_headers() in favor of http_recv_headers2() written in NASL
- The Windows Bulletin checks now check the version of the files on the remote host (when possible) instead of looking at the registry
- It is now possible to disable CGI scanning entirely in the "Global Settings" preference panel
- Rewritten several key plugins (dcetest.nasl, netbios_name_get.nasl) to better support the underlying protocol
- nessus_tcp_scanner now performs multiple passes, for improved reliability. It also is much quicker against BSD machines (which have a rate limitation for the RST they send)